DODES'KA-DEN: The History and Allegories that led to the Creation of Akira Kurosawa's most pessimistic film
TOHOThroughout his career, Japanese director and cinema legend Akira Kurosawa has been a renowned humanitarian, whose films always strived to provide a "worth-fighting" attitude towards the world and society.
When talking about the strong themes in his work, usual suspects like Ikiru, Drunken Angel and Seven Samurai come to mind, but even in his darkest of films – The Lower Depths, I Live In Fear, The Idiot, Rashomon and The Bad Sleep Well – the tragedies, injustices and confusion of life are still showcased as something to overcome and rather than something one is helpless against. Alongside these positive themes, Kurosawa always married a healthy dose of national pride, regarding Japan as a hermetic society built upon the ideals of humble and calm lives that were usually in danger to the invasion of western economics and lifestyle changes.
By the time Kurosawa came to making Dodes'ka-den, audience and critics alike had come to expect a particular formula of filmmaking from him that was malleable enough to not go stale. However, when Dodes'ka-den finally released, it was vastly different from his usual formula, so much so that many to this day discuss if Dodes'ka-den even counts as a Kurosawa feature.
Each element of Kurosawa's personality that shined in his previous films were replaced by something opposite. The positive subtextual message of "fight-on" was replaced by a sombre question of "what is the point of fighting?"; the hermetic ideals of Japanese life – like the intelligence of the old or the calmness of a housewife, something that was celebrated in previous Kurosawa features – were suddenly up for question in their relevancy in real-life; the humble message of "enjoy little things in life" was comically replaced by a reply, stating "how does one person enjoy little things in life, when little things are all that person gets?" Most importantly, however, he was not just criticizing the society, the evil and the authorities themselves that plagued the humble commoners of his previous features, he was also presenting a doubt upon the humbleness of such commoners, as he continuously showcased the toxicity, the lust and the prejudice they utilise to deride each other to a ground of shame and personal doubt.
All this combined gave way to an experience that not only feels hateful towards the world itself but also brings a sign of shame by Kurosawa towards Kurosawa, his image and the impact that his previous films had. Many audience members and critics at the time felt that the film was actively trying to be defiant and pessimistic towards what came before, as the director was continually refuting every piece of advice that he himself once gave to people.
However, such defiance and pessimism were not out of the leftfield. The creation of Dodes'ka-den and its unusual existence in the director's catalogue arrives from his identification as the same humanitarian that once made him an optimist, which resulted in him developing a sudden burst of anger towards himself and the then Japanese society as a whole. Problems began to arise during the production of Kurosawa's previous feature, the 1965 Red Beard, a film notable for its nightmarish production that created a rift between the director and his twenty-year-long collaborator Toshiro Mifune. Following the production nightmare of Red Beard was the production nightmare of his failed Tora! Tora! Tora! project, which was both creatively and mentally straining for the director, as his failure to get along with the American production became headline news in his home country, resulting in him being dropped from the film and shattering his dream of entering the western cinema.
At the same time, Japan itself was experiencing westernisation of its lifestyle at a full force, which had been criticised by Kurosawa for throughout his filmography. From television to western clothes, each aspect of the Japanese life was suddenly invaded by the west, and just like Kurosawa — who, despite all of his criticism in his previous films, was eager to work in a western production — everyone was facing a western dream cycle. Unfortunately, the rise of western aspects could not have come at a worse time: 1960s Japan was at its moral deep-end, poverty was everywhere, sterilisation of the mentally ill was at its highest, sexism and sexual assault was an ever-growing problem, and mental issues and trauma in relation to the teenage demographic were starting to emerge as a national problem. Furthermore, due to television becoming a household commodity in the same period of time, it became harder to overlook such societal issues.
Ironically enough, this is also the time Japan was at a precipice of a significant economic boom brought forth by years of post-war industrialisation and expanded export rate of up to 15%. This meant that the class divide was even higher than before and Kurosawa, who was always proud of his country's hermetic unification of people, saw those same ideals crumble into the worst versions of themselves.
These external factors, combined with his struggles, lead the filmmaker's humanitarian side to develop distrust towards himself, the society and the ruling bodies of the government. So, he turned Shūgorō Yamamoto's A Town Without A Season — an otherwise calm exploration of human emotions — into a film with allegorical anger targeted towards everything and anything he found wrong about the world. This anger, while subtextually showcased through every character in the feature, was centrally represented by a father-son duo. The father, a beggar, delusionally obsesses over western houses and riches and, in effect, ignores his child's starvation – who inevitably succumbs to a violent and avoidable death. This allegory serves as an ignorant relationship of the government and the public, Kurosawa and his country, the rich and poor.
This angry presentation of filmmaking would initially backfire for Kurosawa, as its pessimistic delivery would become a main point of contention for Kurosawa's audience and critics, leading to the film's poor box office and critical reception. This poor reception would turn out to be the worst of Kurosawa's career, as it would go on to destroy the then-infant "club of four knights" production, lead by Kurosawa himself, and would stress the director into financial debt that subsequently lead him to attempt suicide in 1971.
Learning from this experience, Kurosawa himself would never attempt to make a film of a similar kind. The director veered towards a path of making more introspective pieces. For a significant part of the 20th century, Dodes'ka-den itself would be dismissed as Kurosawa's aimless experiment in the absence of his long-time collaborators. However, a critical re-evaluation of the film – in the same vein of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude – would reveal the film's ahead-of-its-time moralistic approach towards grave issues and its then-unique presentation style of using vignette storytelling to explore the interconnectivity of variety of social issues. This uniqueness would then be replicated by many prominent filmmakers, leading to similar social dramas ranging from critically acclaimed pieces like Todd Solondz's Happiness and Iñárritu's Babel to more controversial films like Paul Haggis's Crash and Larry Clark's Kids. This subtle effect on cinema would go on to reveal the legacy and under-appreciation of a once black sheep in Kurosawa's filmography, whose individual merits and styles have finally found its place in the modern cinema, as its essence and message has now been forwarded through Dodes'ka-den’s modern inspirations, even if the film itself waits for exploration on a larger scale.